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Translations from Greek Into Latin and Arabic During the Middle Ages: Searching for the Classical Tradition

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Translations from Greek Into Latin and Arabic During the Middle Ages: Searching for the Classical Tradition Translations from Greek into Latin and Arabic during the Middle Ages: Searching for the Classical Tradition By Maria Mavroudi Byzantium’s relationship with what we call “the classical tradition” is central to the development of its civilization and has been extensively discussed by Byzan- tinists for a number of reasons: since the fifteenth-century Renaissance, European interest in Byzantium was spurred by research on classical antiquity, and Byzan- tine literary culture was generally treated as a warehouse from which to retrieve information on ancient texts.1 In addition, Byzantine studies as a modern aca- demic discipline was formed around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, when the classical tradition was understood as a con- stituent part of modern Western culture, while ancient Greece and Rome served as political and aesthetic paradigms for the world’s industrialized nations.2 Unquestionably, a proper appreciation of Byzantine writing, both belletristic and technical, requires a thorough familiarity with the classical tradition: a select but still extensive part of ancient Greek literary production continued to be studied throughout the Byzantine period, and several high-style Byzantine compositions from the fourth until the fifteenth century successfully reproduced the linguistic register of works dating between the fifth century BC and the second century AD.3 Yet modern familiarity with the ancient classics until relatively recently 1 On the search for the classical tradition as a gateway to Byzantine studies, see the introduction in George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969), 1–2, outlining the history of Byzantine studies as a discipline; more recently, see Elisabeth Jeffreys et al., “Byzantine Studies as an Academic Discipline,” in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elisabeth Jeffreys et al. (Oxford, 2008), 3–20, at 14. 2 The bibliography on the reception of the classical tradition from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century is extensive and has been growing fast during the last decade; some recent examples: Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, eds., A Companion to the Classical Tradition (Malden, MA, 2008); Craig W. Kallendorf, ed., A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, MA, 2007); Judith P. Hallett and Christopher Stray, eds., British Classics outside England: The Academy and Beyond (Waco, 2009); Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1750–1900 (Baltimore, 2002); Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, 2007). 3 Predictably, several observations on medieval Latin literature in Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Middle Ages,” in Hardwick and Stray, eds., A Companion to the Classical Tradition, 17–29, also apply to high-style Byzantine literature. Christian authors, both in the Latin “West” and in the Greek “East,” developed various modes of appropriating pagan texts: they studied them with circumspection or accommodation and reassembled classical elements in ways that suited Christian beliefs and aesthetics, for example, by composing centos or by investing pagan ideas with allegorical meaning. Classicism was an educational goal that involved pursuing a primarily linguistic ideal. The learned and vernacular traditions existed in communication with one another, which means that elements of classicism may be found in both. For example, heroes of the classical repertoire, such as Alexander, appear in prolific medieval vernacular narratives. Ancient visual art clearly influenced its medieval counterpart. Speculum 90/1 (January 2015) doi:10.1017/S0038713414002450 28 Translations from Greek into Latin and Arabic 29 commonly resulted in understanding Byzantine literary production as an inferior imitation of its ancient Greek counterpart that lacks originality and creativity.4 Byzantinists have debated in which way and how much of the classical tradition was absorbed by Byzantium. Some have highlighted that Byzantium preserved it—a fortuitous event, since it was “a prerequisite for Western renascence”;5 oth- ers have refuted such claims, primarily because they imply continuity between the ancient and the medieval world.6 The third possible approach to the prob- lem, namely to map the variegations in Byzantium’s understanding of the clas- sical tradition in the course of its millennial history, has also been undertaken.7 However, in spite of such extensive discussions by Byzantinists, it is telling that some of the most recent publications on the later reception of the classical tradi- tion largely ignore the Greek-speaking world.8 This is symptomatic of the overall Throughout the Middle Ages, the cultural pillars of the literate included not only the classical tradition, but also the biblical and patristic heritage of Christianity. 4 See, for example, the negative assessments of Byzantine literature by Romilly Jenkins, “The Hel- lenistic Origins of Byzantine Literature,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 37–52; and by Cyril Mango, Byzantine Literature as a Distorting Mirror: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the Uni- versity of Oxford on 21 May, 1974 (Oxford, 1975), 3–18; repr. in Cyril Mango, Byzantium and Its Image (London, 1984); for an overview of earlier negative criticism of Byzantine literature, including but not limited to its relation with the classical tradition, see Margaret Mullett, “New Literary History and the History of Byzantine Literature: A Worthwhile Endeavor?,” in Paolo Odorico and Panagi- otis A. Agapitos, eds., Pour une nouvelle histoire de la litterature´ byzantine: Problemes,` methodes,´ approches, propositions. Actes du Colloque international philologique, Nicosie, Chypre, 25–28 mai 2000 (Paris, 2002), 37–60. For a call for a more nuanced understanding of the relation between Byzantine literature and its ancient counterpart, see Jan Olof Rosenqvist, Die byzantinische Literatur vom 6. Jahrhundert bis zum Fall Konstantinopels 1453 (Berlin, 2007), 196–201. For an example of nuanced understanding, see Stephanos´ Efthymiadis, “Le ‘premier classicisme byzantin’: Mythes grecs et reminiscences paıennes¨ chez Photios, Leon´ VI le Sage et Arethas´ de Cesar´ ee,”´ in Pour l’amour de Byzance: Hommage a` Paolo Odorico, ed. Christian Gastgeber, Charis Messis, Dan Ioan Mures¸an, et Filippo Ronconi (Frankfurt am Main, 2013), 99–114. 5 Herbert Hunger, “The Classical Tradition in Byzantine Literature: The Importance of Rhetoric,” in Byzantium and the Classical Tradition, ed. Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott, 35–47; Hunger, “On the Imitation of Antiquity (␮␫␮␩␴␫´ ς ) in Byzantine Literature,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23 (1969–70): 15–38. 6 For an attack on the idea that Byzantium preserved the classical tradition, which is traced to the nineteenth century, see Cyril Mango, “Discontinuity with the Classical Past in Byzantium,” Byzantium and the Classical Tradition (Birmingham, UK, 1981), 48–57; Mango proposes instead that the outlook of the average Byzantine was not defined by “classical antiquity as we understand it, but by a construct of the Christian and Jewish apologists built up in the first five or six centuries AD. This body of doctrine was very consistently worked out and its ingredients were mostly biblical with an admixture from other sources, both classical and oriental, but always subordinated to the teachings of the Bible. By giving universal currency to this view of the world, Byzantium achieved its distinctive place in the history of thought” (57). 7 The most recent book-length contribution along these lines is by Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, UK, 2007). 8 Kallendorf, ed., A Companion to the Classical Tradition, includes a chapter on the Latin Middle Ages but omits Byzantium and the post-Byzantine period; Hardwick and Stray, eds., A Companion to Classical Receptions, includes an article on the fourth-century Greek father Basil of Caesarea and his views on Greek tragedy but nothing further on the Byzantine millenium; Hallett and Stray, eds., British Classics outside England, omits Greece. Speculum 90/1 (January 2015) 30 Translations from Greek into Latin and Arabic marginalization (frequently through orientalization) of Byzantium in modern nar- ratives of European or world history that Byzantinists have begun to discuss since not very long ago.9 To a certain extent it also reflects a, until recently, widely held view that Byzantium preserved a fossilized version of its classical heritage without creative elaboration—a position that potentially facilitates the retrieval of ancient Greek literature out of Byzantine manuscripts, as it simplifies the pro- cess of identifying and removing Byzantine interventions from the body of ancient texts.10 The importance attributed to the classical tradition in shaping Western moder- nity as it was understood towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century also generated an interest in the medieval translations of Greek works into Arabic and Latin, works that were mostly technical and be- longed to the fields of philosophy and science. These translations were inventoried and their significance was discussed in works on cultural history, philosophy, and science,11 which agreed with one another because they were inspired by the same zeitgeist and used mostly the same body of primary and secondary literature (based on its availability in modern
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